How to Abuse Someone’s Harmful Content

In April, The Financial Times reported that Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, had entered into an open skirmish with Elon Musk over what “rules” should be respected regarding freedom of speech allowed on X, Musk’s rebranding of Twitter. Saying “Elon, there are rules,” Breton insisted “that Twitter must comply with the EU’s new digital rules under its ownership, or risk hefty fines or even a ban, setting the stage for a global regulatory battle over the future of the social media platform.”

That was in April. Last week, on August 12, in anticipation of Musk’s scheduled interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Breton posted an extraordinary preemptive warning on X against the “amplification of harmful content.”

Today Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Harmful content:

Any words, phrases or ideas expressed by individuals that are simply not liked by certain people or groups in a position of power.

Contextual note

In his letter, Breton raises concerns about the potential for language use that “could have harmful effects on social debate and public safety.” His definition of “harmful” applies to “content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence or certain cases of disinformation.”

“Instances of disinformation” captures the essence of Breton’s complaint. The idea that people can say things that are not true, and that all instances of untruth must be suppressed, has become a standard obsession of those who seek to exercise power over the unenlightened masses.

While he has no idea what would happen in a conversation that hasn’t yet taken place, the commissioner clearly expects Musk and Trump to spout the kind of odious ideas that his authority has the power to punish. Much like George W. Bush’s preemptive invasion of Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from using the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that pundits Hans Blix and Scott Ritter insisted didn’t exist, Breton has been preparing his own invasion of X to prevent Musk and Trump from saying things he believes might be politically incorrect.

As I pointed out last week in “Devil’s Dictionary,” the political class has even co-opted the idea of ​​critical thinking, which implies an openness to considering multiple perspectives before constructing meaning through exposure to all of them, and transformed its definition into following and banishing unconventional positions. In other words, the idea of ​​critical thinking is being turned on its head in the service of authorized, conformist thinking.

Breton’s remarks underscore another feature of the new culture of censorship that has been gaining momentum since 2016, when it became the main weapon to counter Trump’s apparent preference for outlandish exaggerations and “alternative facts.” Censorship has become a transnational crusade waged by the defensive alliance of North America and Europe that we call “the West.” In this sense, NATO’s expansion was not just about territorial expansion eastward to Russia’s borders, but also about the revival of the McCarthyist instinct that poisoned American political culture in the 1950s.

Europe has managed to avoid the McCarthyist epidemic that successfully transformed the meaning of the word “communist” for Americans into the equivalent of “possessing diabolical intentions.” “Since the relevant content is accessible to EU users,” Breton notes, “and is also amplified in our jurisdiction, we cannot rule out possible spillovers in the EU.” He wants to protect Europeans from contagion. With the concept of “spillover,” Breton rightly emphasizes Europe’s current willingness to imitate and adopt the worst political practices exported from America.

But Breton’s moment of triumph did not last 24 hours. On August 13, an article appeared Through The Financial Times was titled: “Brussels slams Thierry Breton over letter with ‘damaging content’ to Elon Musk.” Breton’s own masters judged that the commissioner had gone too far with his accompanying letter. It was bad PR, making Europe look like a kind of bully, a role that Washington usually exercises over Europe.

In a further irony, the FT quotes an EU official who explained that “Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking.” In other words, he is a loose cannon, guilty, in his own way, of producing “harmful content” that could jeopardize Europe’s image as a culture committed to respecting the rights of all citizens, including prominent American billionaires with monosyllabic surnames like Musk and Trump.

Historical note

In the fourth and final book of Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s TravelsA breed of horses called the Houyhnhnms not only have the gift of human speech, they use it in the most intelligent way possible. They cannot say anything that is untrue. In their language—unlike that of Thierry Breton or countless people in Washington, DC who have put “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “harmful content” at the top of their useful vocabulary lists—the Houyhnhnms do not even have a word to express the concept of lying.

Breton and a new class of censors who increasingly want to impose rules on the way people speak in public seem to regard Swift’s Houyhnhnm model as an ideal to be emulated. They are busy devising mechanisms that will prevent anything they might characterize as potentially harmful from being said in public—even before it is spoken or written. After all, there could be a “spillover.”

The problem Swift noticed — and which drove his character, Lemuel Gulliver, mad — is that as a master of the English language, he understood that almost everything people say cannot be strictly true. Even the famous Oxford philosophers of language in the 20th century, who reduced philosophy itself to the question of what language can express, concluded that there is no principle that can establish the truth of a proposition. Bertrand Russell could prove that the sentence, “the king of France is bald” is false — even though it could theoretically be true — but no philosopher has found a way to prove that a proposition is true.

In the United States, there is now a debate about whether the freedom of speech so unambiguously enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution can have any meaning. A century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used the analogy of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” to argue that there must be limits to what one can say in public. The context of Holmes’s ruling was the debate over the constitutionality of the now infamous Espionage Act. Congress passed the law during World War I, when fears of German espionage were real. Long considered irrelevant, recent presidents have repeatedly invoked it in recent years against whistleblowers and journalists, including Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

The legal definition of disinformation is: “False information shared intentionally to cause harm.” Lawmakers have no capacity to precisely define “harm,” meaning that potentially any discourse or act of expression can fall into a category of speech that must be suppressed. The campaign to brand critics of Israel’s policies and actions as anti-Semitic on the grounds that such criticism offends the sensibilities of Zionist Jews continues and has proven highly effective in the US and Europe.

Whatever disagreement there may still be within Europe between Thierry Breton and his boss, Ursula von der Leyen, there can be little doubt that the official crackdown on “harmful content” from both sides of the Atlantic will continue. A far more worrying case is that of British journalist Richard Medhurst, who was arrested by his country’s police at Heathrow Airport, held in appalling conditions and charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. His crime? Producing a style of harmful content known as factual reporting.

Future historians will be challenged to find an original name for an episode in history that began with Joe McCarthy, spanned a period that also included President Joe Biden, and will likely continue unchecked, with the help of AI, into some unspecified future. As the world awaits a looming showdown between civilizations that will either define a new world order or culminate in a spectacular nuclear holocaust, we are all cast in the role of unwilling spectators, observing the long-term crisis of democracy. The outcome will inevitably be scripted by a cabal of politicians adept at shielding us from harmful content.

*(In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American humorist, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of common terms, shedding light on their hidden meanings in real-world discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his healthy pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of news readers. Read more from Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.)

(Lee Thompson-Kolar (edited this piece.)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Fair Observer.